The Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has announced that it is beginning a process to relinquish some of the State’s remaining Statehood Act land selections.
Importantly, DNR has not yet identified a final list of specific parcels that will be relinquished. The notice appears to mark the beginning of the process, with parcel-specific decisions still to come.
Alaska was granted approximately 105 million acres under the Alaska Statehood Act and has received title to about 102 million acres, leaving roughly 3.2 million acres of entitlement remaining. At the same time, the State currently has more than 19 million acres in selections and ANILCA Section 906(e) top filings. Federal law allows Alaska to maintain some additional selections, but requires the State to eventually relinquish selections that exceed its allowable entitlement
What does relinquishment mean?
These are generally federal lands the State selected for possible future conveyance, not lands Alaska already owns. Relinquishing a selection means the State gives up its claim to receive that land through its Statehood Act entitlement. DNR says it will focus on lower-priority selections.
Which lands are affected?
That is not yet clear.
DNR says future relinquishments will be publicly noticed as individual parcels or groups of parcels, with separate public notices and decisions posted through the State’s Online Public Notice system. The agency has also created an interactive State-Selected Land Relinquishment StoryMap showing areas being considered, parcels that eventually go out for public notice, and the overall progress of the process.
For communities such as Wiseman, future relinquishment decisions could be significant if they involve nearby lands. However, nothing in the current notice identifies lands near Wiseman, or elsewhere, as definitively slated for relinquishment.
What we’ll be watching
The Northern Alaska Environmental Center will be watching the individual relinquishment notices as they are released, particularly where proposed decisions could affect public access, fish and wildlife habitat, subsistence resources, conservation lands, or communities in Interior and northern Alaska.
For now, the most important takeaway is that DNR has announced the beginning of a much larger land-selection cleanup process, but the decisions about specific lands are still to come.
As those parcels are identified, Alaskans will have a better opportunity to understand what is proposed, why the State considers a particular selection lower priority, and what relinquishment could mean for the future management of those lands.
The Brooks Range, near Galbraith Lake. Photo by Emily Hikes